I’ve got a new Arduino board (Arduino nano) and I want to hack a little bit. Today I want to play with IR receiver. My idea is to use my TV’s remote and switch on/off one bedside lamp, using one relay. It’s a simple Arduino program. First we need to include de IRremote library.

Normally IR receivers have three pins. Vcc (5V), Gnd and signal. We only need to connect the IR receiver to our Arduino and see which hex codes uses our TV’s remote. Then we only need to fire our relay depending on the code.

The last week was deSymfony conference in Castellón (Spain). IMHO deSymfony is the best conference I’ve ever attended. The talks are good but from time to now I appreciate this kind of events not because of them. I like to go to events because of people, the coffee breaks and the community (and in deSymfony is brilliant at this point). This year I cannot join to the conference. It was a pity. A lot of good friends there. So I only can follow the buzz in Twitter, read the published slides (thanks Raul) and wait for the talk videos in youtube.

Tweets are in Spanish but the translation is clear: Javier Eguiluz (Symfony Core Team member and co-organizer of the conference) said in his talk: “Silex is dead”. At the time I read the tweets his slides were not available yet, but a couple of days after the slides were online. The slide 175 is clear “Silex is dead”

Javier recommends us not to use Silex in future new projects and mark existing ones as “legacy”. It’s hard to me. If you have ever read my blog you will notice that I’m a big fan of Silex. Each time I need a backend, a API/REST server of something like that the first thing I do is “composer require silex/silex”. I know that Silex has limitations. It’s built on top of Pimple dependency injection container and Pimple is really awful, but this microframework gives to me exactly what I need. It’s small, simple, fast enough and really easy to adapt to my needs.

I remember a dinner in deSymfony years ago speaking with Javier in Barcelona. He was trying to “convince” me to use Symfony full stack framework instead of Silex. He almost succeeded, but I didn’t like Symfony full stack. Too complicated for me. A lot interesting things but a lot of them I don’t really need. I don’t like Symfony full stack framework, but I love Symfony. For me it’s great because of its components. They’re independent pieces of code that I can use to fit exactly to my needs instead of using a full-stack framework. I’ve learn a lot SOLID reading and hacking with Symfony components. I’m not saying that full stack frameworks are bad. I only say that they’re not for me. If I’m forced to use them I will do it, but if I can choose, I definitely choose a micro framework, even for medium an big projects.

New version of Symfony (Symfony 4) is coming next November and reading the slides of Javier at slideshare I can get an idea of its roadmap. My summary is clear: “Brilliant”. It looks like the people of Symfony listen to my needs and change all the framework to adapt it to me. After understand the roadmap I think that I need to change to title of the post (Initially it was only “Silex is dead”). Silex is not dead. For me Symfony (the full stack framework) is the death. Silex will be upgraded and will be renamed to Symfony (I know that this assertion is subjective. It’s just my point of view). So the bad feeling that I felt when I read Julieta and Asier’s tweets turns into a good one. Good move SensioLabs!

But I’ve got a problem right now. What can I do if I need to start a new project today? Symfony 4 isn’t ready yet. Javier said that we can use Symfony Flex and create new projects with Symfony 3 with the look and feel of Symfony 4, but Flex is still in alpha and I don’t want to play with alpha tools in production. Especially in the backend. I’m getting older, I know. For me the backend is a commodity right now. I need the backend to serve JSON mainly.

I normally use PHP and Silex here only because I’m very confortable with it. In the projects, business people doesn’t care about technologies and frameworks. It’s our job (or our problem depending on how to read it). And don’t forget one thing: Developers are part of business, so in one part of my mind I don’t care about frameworks also. I care about making things done, maximising the potential of technology and driving innovation to customer benefits (good lapidary phrase, isn’t it?).

So I’ve started looking for alternatives. My objective here is clear: I want to find a framework to do the things that I usually do with Silex. Nothing more. And there’s something important here: The tool must be easy to learn. I want to master (or at least become productive) the tool in a couple of days maximum.

I started with the first one: Lumen and I think I will stop searching. Lumen is the micro framework of Laravel. Probably in the PHP world now there’re two major communities: Symfony and Laravel. Maybe if we’re strict Laravel and Symfony are not different communities. In fact Laravel and Symfony shares a lot of components. So maybe both communities are the same.

I’ve almost never played with Laravel and it’s time to study it a little bit. Time ago I used Eloquent ORM but since I hate ORMs I always return to PDO/DBAL. As I said before I didn’t like Symfony full stack framework. It’s too complex for me, and Laravel is the same. When I started with PHP (in the early 2000) there weren’t any framework. I remember me reading books of Java and J2EE. Trying to understand something in its nightmare of acronyms, XMLs configurations and trying to build my own framework in PHP. Now in 2017 to build our own framework in PHP is good learning point but use it with real projects is ridiculous. As someone said before (I don’t remember who) “Everybody must build his own framework, and never use it at all“.

Swap from Silex to Lumen is pretty straightforward. In fact with one ultra-minimal application it’s exactly the same:

If you’re a Silex user you only need a couple of hours reading the Lumen docs and you will be able to set up a new project without any problem. Concepts are the same, slight differences and even cool things such as groups and middlewares. Nothing impossible to do with Silex, indeed, but with a very smart and simple interface. If I need to create a new project right now I will use Lumen without any doubt.

Next winter, when Symfony 4 arrives, I probably will face the problem of choose. But past years I’ve been involved into the crazy world of JavaScript: Angular, Angular2, React, npm, yarn, webpack, … If I’ve survived this (finally I choose JQuery, but that’s a different story :), I am ready for all right now.

These days I’m playing with IoT. Today I want to use MQTT protocol to comunicate between different devices. First I’ve start a mqtt broker in my Laptop. For testing I’ll use mosquitto server. In production we can use RabbitMQ or even a 3party server such as iot.eclipse.org or even Amazon’s IoT service.

The idea is emit one value with one device, and listen this value whit the rest of devices and perform one action depending on that value. For example I will use one potentiometer connected to on NodeMcu micro controller.

This controller will connect to the mqtt broker and will emit the value of the potentiometer (reading the analog input) into one topic (called “potentiometer”). We can code our NodeMcu with Lua but I’m more confortable with C++ and Arduino IDE. First I need to connect to my Wifi and then connect to broker and start emmiting potentiometer’s values

Finally we’ll use one Raspberry Pi with a Sense Hat and we’ll display with its led matrix different colors and dots, depending on the NodeMcu’s value. In the same way than the Arduino script here we only need to listen to the broker’s topic and perform the actions with the sense hat. Now with Python

Today I want to use the NFC tag reader module with my Arduino. The idea is build a simple prototype to read NFC tags and validate them against a remote server (for example a node tcp server). Depending on the tag we’ll trigger one digital output or another. In the example we’ll connect leds to those outputs, but in the real life we can open door or something similar.

In this example we’ll use a ethernet shield to connect our Arduino board to the LAN. We must take care with it. If we use ethernet shield with a MFRC522 there’s a SPI conflict (due to ethernet shield’s SD card reader). We need to use another SDA pin (here I’m using pin 8 instead of 10) and disable w5100 SPI before configure ethernet.

The easiest way to connect our Arduino board to our Raspberry Py is using the USB cable, but sometimes this communication is a nightmare, especially because there isn’t any clock signal to synchronize our devices and we must rely on the bitrate. There’re different ways to connect our Arduino and our Raspberry Py such as I2C, SPI and serial over GPIO. Today we’re going to speak about I2C, especially because it’s pretty straightforward if we take care with a couple of things. Let’s start.

I2C uses two lines SDA (data) and SCL (clock), in addition to GND (ground). SDA is bidirectional so we need to ensure, in one way or another, who is sending data (master or slave). With I2C only master can start communications and also master controls the clock signal. Each device has a 7bit direction so we can connect 128 devices to the same bus.

If we want to connect Arduino board and Raspberry Pi we must ensure that Raspberry Pi is the master. That’s because Arduino works with 5V and Raspberry Pi with 3.3V. That means that we need to use pull-up resistors if we don’t want destroy our Raspberry Pi. But Raspberry Pi has 1k8 ohms resistors to the 3.3 votl power rail, so we can connect both devices (if we connect other i2c devices to the bus they must have their pull-up resistors removed)

Thats all we need to connect our Raspberry pi to our Arduino board.

RPi SDA to Arduino analog 4

RPi SCL to Arduino analog 5

RPi GND to Arduino GND

Now we are going to build a simple prototype. Raspberry Pi will blink one led (GPIO17) each second and also will send a message (via I2C) to Arduino to blink another led. That’s the Python part

Basically everything we can do with Arduino it can be done also with a Raspberry Pi (an viceversa). There’re things that they’re easy to do with Arduino (connect sensors for example). But another things (such as work with REST servers, databases, …) are “complicated” with Arduino and C++ (they are possible but require a lot of low level operations) and pretty straightforward with Raspberry Pi and Python (at least for me and because of my background)

With this small project I want to use an Arduino board and Raspberry Pi working together. The idea is blink two LEDs. One (green one) will be controlled by Raspberry Pi directly via GPIO and another one (red one) will be controlled by Arduino board. Raspberry Pi will be the “brain” of the project and will tell to Arduino board when turn on/off it’s led. Let’s show you the code.

As we can see the script is a simple loop and blink led (using pin 12) with one interval of one second. Our Arduino board is connected directly to the Raspberry Pi via USB cable and we send commands via serial interface.

Here our Arduino Board is listening to serial interface (with serialEvent) and each time we receive “\n” the main loop will turn on/off the led depending on value (1 – On, 0 – Off)

We can use I2C and another ways to connect Arduino and Raspberry Pi but in this example we’re using the simplest way to do it: A USB cable. We only need a A/B USB cable. We don’t need any other extra hardware (such as resistors) and the software part is pretty straightforward also.

I’ve got a Wemo switch and a BeeWi temperature/humidity sensor. I’ve use them in previous projects. Today I want a control humidity level in a room. The idea is switch on/off a dehumidifier (plugged to Wemo switch) depending on the humidity (from BeeWi sensor). Let’s start.

I’ve got one script (node) that reads humidity from the sensor (via BTLE)

Do you remember the las post about RabbitMQ? In that post we created a small wrapper library to use RabbitMQ with node and PHP. I also work with Python and I also want to use the same RabbitMQ wrapper here. With Python there’re several libraries to use Rabbit. I’ll use pika.

The idea is the same than the another post. I want to use queues, exchanges and RPCs. So let’s start with queues:

I need to use RabbitMQ in one project. I’m a big fan of Gearman, but I must admit Rabbit is much more powerful. In this project I need to handle with PHP code and node, so I want to build a wrapper for those two languages. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel so I will use existing libraries (php-amqplib and amqplib for node).

Basically I need to use three things: First I need to create exchange channels to log different actions. I need to decouple those actions from the main code. I also need to create work queues to ensure those works are executed. It doesn’t matter if work is executed later but it must be executed. And finally RPC commands.

I’m learning Docker. In this post I want to share a little experiment that I have done. I know the code looks like over-engineering but it’s just an excuse to build something with docker and containers. Let me explain it a little bit.

The idea is build a Time clock in the browser. Something like this:

Yes I know. We can do it only with js, css and html but we want to hack a little bit more. The idea is to create:

A Silex/PHP frontend

A WebSocket server with socket.io/node

A Python script to obtain the current time

WebSocket server will open 2 ports: One port to serve webSockets (socket.io) and another one as a http server (express). Python script will get the current time and it’ll send it to the webSocket server. Finally one frontend(silex) will be listening to WebSocket’s event and it will render the current time.

Now we’ve got the three containers but we want to use all together. We’ll use a docker-compose.yml file. The web container will expose port 80 and node container 8080. Node container also opens 6400 but this port is an internal port. We don’t need to access to this port outside. Only Python container needs to access to this port. Because of that 6400 is not mapped to any port in docker-compose